Robotics /^\ NASA's Mars Program Now Includes 2020 Rover: It's been just four months si... #robot #AI #sci

It's been just four months since Curiosity landed on Mars , and NASA is already planning for her successor. At a press conference held in conjunction with the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco yesterday, the agency officially announced its intention to land a next-generation version of the rover on Mars in 2020. Even though it hasn't found Martians yet, I'm personally prepared to declare Curiosity a success based (if nothing else) on the fact that it managed to land itself in one piece and all of its instruments are fully functional. NASA has much stricter criteria for success, of course, but part of what gives this robot so much potential to do amazing things is that very smart people spent a very long time carefully planning out how all of her little bits would function. And that means a really, really long lead time. The as-yet unnamed 2020 NASA...